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Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Why “My Door is Always Open” Isn’t Good Enough

It’s sort of a one question IQ test – if your employee has a
concern, particularly a safety concern, do you want to know about their
concern? Of course you do. In fact, if we pressed you further you would likely
say that it’s very important to get that information from your employee. You
would probably admit that information from your employees about what’s really
happening on the ground floor is vital. In fact it’s pretty rare to find a
manager or supervisor (or, much less, a safety manager) that says that information
from employees is not very valuable.

But here’s the thing, when we ask most managers and
supervisors (and yes, including safety managers) what they are doing to get
this valuable information from employees we get a pretty consistent response –
“the employees know that my door is always open.”

On the surface this seems like a good idea. After all,
you’re a pretty approachable person, right? And it can’t really be that hard
for someone to just walk into your office, sit down, and bring up a concern,
can it?

Here’s the thing though – in nearly every case where the
only way that employees can bring up safety concerns is through an “open door”
policy, when we talk to the line employees there’s a perception that management
doesn’t know what’s really happening in the organization and that management
doesn’t really care.

How can this be? After all, we’re pretty sure that most of
the managers and supervisors we’ve talked to who said that their “door is
always open” meant it. They really, genuinely wanted to know what employee
concerns were. Why weren’t employees taking advantage of the open door policy?

The only natural conclusion is that it must be something
wrong with the employees, right? …right?

Maybe it’s not that simple. To understand the problem a
little better lets simplify it a little bit. So a manager wants to get
something out of employees, in this case it’s information, but let’s keep it
general for now and just say that the manager wants anything out of an
employee. The manager has two options to get the employee to do what they want
– the passive approach and the active approach. In the passive approach, the
manager waits for the employees to give the manager what he/she wants. In the
active approach, the manager goes out and gets what they want.

Just on its face, it should be pretty clear that (a) open
door policies are closer to the passive approach, and (b) the passive approach
will be less effective in the long run. But let’s examine this more closely.

Let’s consider the fact that there are some things that the
manager takes an active approach on. For example, there are plenty of
production issues where the manager doesn’t wait for employees, they go out and
get what they want. So what really determines what the manager takes the passive
and active approaches on? Usually it’s a matter of priorities. Those things
that the manager just can’t leave to chance require an active approach because
they are too important. Of course, the manager has a finite amount of time, and
therefore they can’t take the active approach on everything, so those things
that are important, but not the highest priority get the passive approach.

If this is true, that means that the typical approach most
organizations take toward employee feedback and concerns shows that employee
feedback and concerns are not a high priority. The cause of this belief could
be because of one or both of the following:

The manager may not feel that learning is a high priority
for an organization.

The manager does not feel that employee feedback and
concerns are a good source of learning in the organization.

In the safety space, both of these ideas are caustic and
hopefully we don’t have to explain why (we can if you’d like though). But we
have to come to grips with the fact that no matter what we think, when we take
passive approaches to employee interaction we send a message that the
information that employees have is not very important to us. And then we wonder
why there’s a trust deficit in our organizations.

Now, open door policies are fine, but they won’t really work
unless they are coupled with active approaches. If organizational learning
through identifying what’s really happening on the ground floor is really
valuable to your company (it should be) then you need to get out from behind
your desk and start talking to people. You may not like what you hear, but
that’s sort of the point – if you don’t like what you hear that means that
there are things happening in your organization that you also would not like.
But ignoring it doesn’t make it go away. If you are a manager, supervisor, or
safety professional you aren’t paid to dig your head into the sand. Your job is
to make the organization work, which involves finding and fixing problems. You
can’t do that from behind a desk. You won’t get this information from a
spreadsheet.

And you know what? Your employees know all of this. They
know that you don’t know everything that’s really happening in your
organization. But when you don’t ever engage them and ask them it says to them
that you don’t really care. They start to think that other things are more
important to you than their perspective. They expect you to be a leader and
leaders lead by action, and when you take an active approach to things like
production and take a passive approach to their concerns, can we fault them for
thinking that you don’t really care? So why would they go out of their way, put
their neck on the line, to tell you about the issues? They will just go on
making the best of a tough situation, like they always have and you will be
none the wiser…that is, until the accident happens.

The bottom line is that if you really care about what your
employees think and you really want to hear their feedback and concerns, prove
it.

2 comments:

Great topic and insight! You mentioned that whether the manager takes the passive or active approaches is usually a matter of priorities. I would agree except I would change priorities to values. Priorities change, values are long lasting and those values usually reflect the organization's overall values and culture. What get's measured matters. And what matter most is obvious to employees even if managers don't realize it.

I agree overall Ron (how could I not with such a great name!). I would just say that the point here is that people's values are not in line with their behavior. So, in this case, people claim to value organizational learning, but they aren't doing what is necessary to achieve that. I think priorities can trump values sometimes if we don't make those values explicit and create a system that makes exercising those values convenient.